The National Health Service

Abstract

The United Kingdom’s National Health Service faces perhaps the most demanding decade since its creation. Despite avoiding the scale of spending cuts suffered by other parts of the public sector since 2010 such as local government, the NHS faces budget rises way below healthcare inflation. Demand pressures from a population which is both growing and ageing, greater numbers of patients with long-term chronic illnesses and constantly developing medical technology are expected to add 4% a year to NHS costs for the next decade. With expected budget increases of 0.1% a year, this means the NHS needs to reduce its costs by 4% a year just to stand still. Yet since it was formed in 1948 the NHS has increased its costs by an average annual 4% and even higher in the decade to 2010. As one analysis warned in 2012, ‘After 2014/15, to avoid cuts to the service or a fall in the quality of care patients receive, the NHS in England must either achieve unprecedented sustained increases in productivity, or funding will need to increase in real terms’.¹